Is it ok to run computer for hours without shutting it down?

Most of us let our Desktop or Laptop run for days…weeks..or even years put together. Is it safe? will that impact my data? will that impact its performance? We at Stellar Phoenix face many such questions on daily bases. There is nothing wrong in leaving a machine run for extended hours. A computer has more detrimental impact from electrical spikes and failure of drives etc than simply leaving the PC running.

Heat can be your biggest enemy. You will find that even with the energy new conservation settings available, heat is produced when power is consumed. Yes with proper ventilation the IC components will remain in the tolerable operating range of temperature. However life span is shortened by heat. However variance in temperature from shutting off, then turning on (cool/hat) also damages the chips lifespan.

The most important component that is affected mostly is the hard drive unfortunately its the worse component to crash because it holds all your important data. A hard drive usually is made for 3000-5000 hours of normal usage. Hard drive manufactures offer 3-5 years of manufacture warrantee but Customers replace disk drives 15 times more often than drive vendors’ estimate, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University. The comparatively high replacement rates are not surprising because of the difference between the “clean room” environment in which vendors test and the heat, dust, noise or vibrations in an actual work environment. Experts have also seen overall drive quality falling over time as the result of price competition in the industry.

We can also argue that the same hard drives are part of these sophisticated servers and they run for years put together then why will the same hard drive crashes in my desktop or laptop?

We at Stellar Phoenix would suggest one should not let a machine run un-attended for hours together. One should always shutdown of not then leave your machine on hibernate mode to avoid any permanent data loss.